Service Announces Recovery Plan Revisions for 25 Species, To Assist in Measuring Progress and Addressing Threats

As part of an agency-wide effort to advance the recovery of our nation’s most imperiled species, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has made publicly available draft revisions for 21 recovery plans that provide a recovery roadmap for 25 federally protected species. This batch of recovery plan revisions is part of the Department of the Interior’s Agency Priority Performance Goals. The effort calls for all recovery plans to include quantitative criteria on what constitutes recovery by September 2019.

Recovery plans are non-regulatory guidance documents that identify, organize and prioritize recovery actions, set measurable recovery objectives, and include time and cost estimates. In total, the Service will revise up to 182 recovery plans covering some 305 species listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

The Service’s success in preventing extinctions and recovering species is due to ESA-inspired partnerships with diverse stakeholders, such as state, federal, and tribal wildlife agencies, industry, conservation groups and citizens. Each species for which recovery criteria are being revised in this effort has undergone or is currently undergoing a status review that considers the best scientific and commercial data that have become available since the species’ listing or most recent status review. This information includes: (1) the biology of the species, (2) habitat conditions, (3) conservation measures that have benefitted the species, (4) threat status and trends in relation to the five listing factors, and (5) other information, data, or corrections.

As such, these revisions reflect scientific and informational updates, which have been gained from years of collaborative work with our partners. Revisions benefit endangered and threatened species, our partners, and the public by sharing the best available information about what is really needed to achieve recovery.

Under guidance established in 2010, partial revisions, such as amendments, allow the Service to efficiently and effectively update recovery plans with the latest science and information when a recovery plan may not warrant the time or resources required to undertake a full revision of the plan. This batch includes both amendments and full recovery plan revisions, as noted in the tables below.

The document appears today in the Federal Register Reading Room here: https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection. There will be a 30-day comment period on the proposed revisions, ending on September 4, 2019.

We are requesting submission of any information that enhances understanding of the: (1) species’ biology and threats, and the (2) recovery needs and related implementation issues or concerns. We seek to ensure that we have assembled, considered and incorporated the best available scientific and commercial information into the draft recovery plan revisions for these 25 species.

The plan revisions cover the following species:

Table 1. List of Animals in Batch

1 Denotes a recovery plan amendment in the “Recovery Plan” column
2 Denotes a full recovery plan revision in the “Recovery Plan” column

Table 2. List of Plants in Batch

1 Denotes a recovery plan amendment in the “Recovery Plan” column
2 Denotes a full recovery plan revision in the “Recovery Plan” column